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Re:Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra by wlesieutre on Sunday December 06, 2020 @04:36PM (#25326887)
Could just be thanks to technology office politicking. Some senior engineer or manager says "I want to work on blockchain projects", invents a reason to do that within Facebook, or maybe their boss really wants to keep them there, and somehow they get enough buy-in to create Libra. Now they have a blockchain project.

This seems more likely to me than someone at Facebook saying "We need a our own money system," evaluating blockchain against a centralized design, and deciding for technical reasons that Facebook Money should be a blockchain project.

Re:Diem – A rebrand of Facebook’s Libra by davidgerard on Monday December 07, 2020 @04:11AM (#25330544)
> Some senior engineer or manager says "I want to work on blockchain projects", invents a reason to do that within Facebook, or maybe their boss really wants to keep them there, and somehow they get enough buy-in to create Libra. Now they have a blockchain project.

This is pretty much how it happened. A Bitcoin fan started at Facebook, started from "how do we use a blockchain here" then came up with something to use a blockchain for, and recruited some executives who thought similarly.

Most of what's weird and dumb about Libra/Diem is because it was started by four bitcoiners, from bitcoin ideas. It turns out that ideas from a cryptocurrency that was started in order to evade government control don't play well in the heavily regulated environment of Other People's Money.